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So I want to do corporate work, I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay in Boston for the long haul, I'm also pretty sure I want M&A.

I like the people at all the firms. In a perfect world I'd like to spend a career at Cooley but am afraid that TLS wisdom will hold and I'll burn out in 3-5 years with worse exit options than the other two.

If I was 100% sure I wanted M&A I'd go Skadden because their Boston office is pretty much strict M&A (and the juniors say that they dont spend all their time doing diligence) and I could start getting really great experience on awesome deals from day 1. But if I decide I dont like it, then I'd probably have to either lateral or transfer to NY to get staffed on other stuff.

Going into the process Ropes was my favorite but I've since cooled on them a bit after being told some stuff about the culture by a mid-level. Still it's the place that offers the greatest flexibility in the beginning but I know that their juniors do a bunch of diligence.

So assuming everywhere is miserable and that I only like the people at all of these places because they were smart enough to put the 15% of their respective staffs who are chill and sociable in front of me, what advice would you guys give on picking a firm?

TYIA

Anonymous User wrote:So I want to do corporate work, I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay in Boston for the long haul, I'm also pretty sure I want M&A.

I like the people at all the firms. In a perfect world I'd like to spend a career at Cooley but am afraid that TLS wisdom will hold and I'll burn out in 3-5 years with worse exit options than the other two.

If I was 100% sure I wanted M&A I'd go Skadden because their Boston office is pretty much strict M&A (and the juniors say that they dont spend all their time doing diligence) and I could start getting really great experience on awesome deals from day 1. But if I decide I dont like it, then I'd probably have to either lateral or transfer to NY to get staffed on other stuff.

Going into the process Ropes was my favorite but I've since cooled on them a bit after being told some stuff about the culture by a mid-level. Still it's the place that offers the greatest flexibility in the beginning but I know that their juniors do a bunch of diligence.

So assuming everywhere is miserable and that I only like the people at all of these places because they were smart enough to put the 15% of their respective staffs who are chill and sociable in front of me, what advice would you guys give on picking a firm?

TYIA

I chose Ropes & Gray but then read your post more carefully. I'd probably choose Cooley in that case.

Not doing diligence at Skadden seems like a recruiting pitch. I could actually see doing less diligence at Cooley (working with emerging companies means you tend to be sell side for M&A deals, which means much less diligence), though you'll probably be doing a mix of M&A, venture capital and cap market work, rather than strictly M&A. You might also get more substantive corporate work (though not necessarily more substantive M&A work) working with smaller companies that don't have in-house counsel and rely on outside counsel to do basic stuff. Exit options are probably better classified as "different" rather than "worse" in that you're move likely to wind up at smaller start-up companies.

All that said, if you decide all you want to do is M&A, Skadden will get you more of that than Cooley, and if you want more choices, Ropes will provide that.

Ropes > Skadden > Cooley

Your conception of what you want to do is largely irrelevant at this point. Ropes has the best Boston corporate practice. Ropes will give you the best exit options and the best work. It also crushes every vault ranking like job satisfaction, hours, etc. Skadden Boston is NOT the same quality as Skadden NYC.

Ropes all day for Boston #nobrainer